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Throughout its ~4.5 billion year history, the Earth has experienced periods of warming and cooling. However, the current drastic increase in global temperatures is well outside of the Earth’s cyclic norms, and evidence for human-caused global climate change is compelling. Paleoclimatology, the study of ancient climate conditions, provides ample evidence for human-caused global climate change by comparing recent conditions with those in the past.

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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 13, 2026

Reconstructing Terrestrial Paleoclimate and Paleoecology with Fossil Leaves Using Digital Leaf Physiognomy and Leaf Mass Per Area

Reconstructing Terrestrial Paleoclimate and Paleoecology with Fossil Leaves Using Digital Leaf Physiognomy and Leaf Mass Per Area

Published on: October 25, 2024

Spatial relationship between climatologies and changes in global vegetation activity.

Rogier de Jong¹, Michael E Schaepman, Reinhard Furrer

¹Remote Sensing Laboratories, University of Zurich, Wintherthurerstrasse 190, 8057, Zurich, Switzerland. rogier.dejong@geo.uzh.ch

Global Change Biology

|March 21, 2013

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Changes in vegetation activity are not solely driven by climate shifts. While climate influences over half the spatial variance, other factors like land-use change significantly impact vegetation trends, particularly in regions like Africa.

Related Experiment Videos

Last Updated: May 13, 2026

Reconstructing Terrestrial Paleoclimate and Paleoecology with Fossil Leaves Using Digital Leaf Physiognomy and Leaf Mass Per Area

Reconstructing Terrestrial Paleoclimate and Paleoecology with Fossil Leaves Using Digital Leaf Physiognomy and Leaf Mass Per Area

Published on: October 25, 2024

Area of Science:

Environmental Science
Remote Sensing
Climate Science

Background:

Vegetation is a key component of the terrestrial biosphere, vital for land-cover and climate studies.
Remotely sensed vegetation indices (VI) quantify vegetation activity, with numerous studies on temporal trends.
Processes driving large-scale vegetation changes remain poorly understood.

Purpose of the Study:

To quantify the spatial relationship between climatic factors and vegetation activity changes from 1982-2008.
To model the influence of climate versus other factors on vegetation dynamics.

Main Methods:

Developed an additive spatial model at 0.5° resolution.
The model includes a regression component for climate effects and a spatial field for other influences (e.g., land-use change).
Analyzed changes in temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation against vegetation indices.

Main Results:

Climate changes explained less than 50% of the spatial variance in vegetation activity.
Identified greening trends and browning hotspots in Argentina and Australia linked to climate.
Subequatorial Africa showed browning hotspots in the non-climate-associated component.
Forests exhibited the strongest climate-vegetation relationships, with some showing browning under warming.

Conclusions:

Climate is a significant, but not the sole, driver of vegetation activity changes.
Unaccounted factors, including land-use change and natural effects, play a substantial role in vegetation dynamics.
Warming conditions may negatively impact forest vegetation, a phenomenon observed in dendroclimatology.